The Point No Point Treaty Council is diving into a question that’s been on many minds: how much impact are seals having on salmon populations?
To find out, scientists are counting seals and collecting their scat.
“We know from work broadly done in the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and Strait of Juan de Fuca that seals do consume salmonids,” said Dylan Bergman, the treaty council’s wildlife biologist. “We even have some estimates for the rates of consumption based upon fecal analysis.”
The council, a natural resources consortium that supports the Jamestown S’Klallam and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribes, is taking a closer look locally, counting seals throughout the year and aiming to collect 30 fecal samples per month for the next two years. The samples will be sent to a lab to be tested for DNA and bones from salmonids.
“With the large amount of work that Jamestown is doing on the Dungeness River to restore river health and salmon runs, and the relatively robust seal populations in Dungeness Bay, including seals on Cline Spit, Dungeness and Protection Island national wildlife refuges, we would like to do much more localized sampling and understand what the seal diets look like within Dungeness Bay,” Bergman said.
Because seabird populations are protected on Protection Island, tribal biologists are restricted in where they can go, so they won’t disrupt nesting birds.
Data collection is done only on the northeast side of the island, which has very little shorebird use, Bergman said. This work has led to other questions about seals to be explored in the future, he said, such as what the population looks like during pupping season and how feeding behavior changes when adult salmon are returning to spawn.
The results of the study could contribute to a larger data set of marine mammal diet and regional understanding to help guide marine mammal management.
Seals swim in the water off Protection Island. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal
